Painless Access to Online Information

With all the necessary affordances to generate rich auditory
output in place, speech-enabling Emacs applications using Emacs Lisp's
advice facility requires surprisingly small amounts
of specialized code. With the TTS layer and the Emacspeak core handling
the complex details of producing good quality output, the speech-enabling extensions focus purely on the specialized
semantics of individual applications; this leads to simple
and consequently beautiful code. This section
illustrates the concept with a few choice examples taken from
Emacspeak's rich suite of information access tools.

Right around the time I started Emacspeak, a far more profound
revolution was taking place in the world of computing: the World Wide
Web went from being a tool for academic research to a mainstream forum
for everyday tasks. This was 1994, when writing a browser was still a
comparatively easy task. The complexity that has been progressively
added to the Web in the subsequent 12 years often tends to obscure the
fact that the Web is still a fundamentally simple design where:

Content creators publish web resources addressable via
URIs.

URI-addressable content is retrievable via open
protocols.

Retrieved content is in HTML, a well-understood markup
language.

Notice that the basic architecture just sketched out says little to nothing about how the content is made available to the end user. The mid-1990s saw the Web move toward increasingly complex visual interaction. The ...

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